The Slate article was pretty good and pointed out a basic fact about prostitution today:

“I found this world by accident in 1999, when I started interviewing sex workers in Hell’s Kitchen, Spanish Harlem, and other New York neighborhoods that were points of entry for newly arrived immigrants. I expected to hang out on the streets, but in fact I had to enter apartments, public-housing projects, strip clubs, bars, and brothels to locate subjects. What I found was women checking voice mail or sitting behind computers watching their online ads and e-mail accounts.”

This is very much like the situation in the SF Bay Area. There are maybe two or three active “strolls” in the Bay Area, active pretty much only very late at night, with only a limited number of prostitutes active at any one time. (And male sex workers have disappeared off the streets entirely – I remember a very visible hustler scene on Polk Street as late as the 1980s. But I haven’t spotted a male prostitute working in a public place in years.) This number is dwarfed by the number of indoor/escort workers and massage parlor workers. I am pretty sure this is the typical situation throughout North America, and probably western Europe as well.

(And this is one place where Melissa Farley’s claims simply fall on their ass – she claims street workers as the “typical” prostitute, in all parts of the world.)

One thing I think the Slate article got wrong was its estimate of how typical $1000 encounter prostitutes are. I’d say Craigslist prostitutes, who charge in the hundreds, not thousands, probably represent the “great middle” when it comes to prostitution in North America. $1000 on up is rather rare and largely limited to places like New York and LA.

[…] Spitzer News Links « Bound, Not Gagged “Yet another man deciding for sex workers how their work should be handled. NY Times — please stop publishing this crap. … [T]he stories are getting repetitive and stupid. Unless something new happens, this thing is just going to go in circles for a while.” (tags: Spitzer assholes media msm news sexwork law) […]